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In some ways this is the counterpoint to The Great Gatsby. The author, John O'Hara, points out that the main character, Gloria Wandrous, would have been a flapper if she had been born ten years before. As it was, she was twenty years old in 1930, the depression had the nation in its grip, and the life of the Jazz Age flapper had turned into a continuing round of drinking and bed-hopping.
Gloria is, to put in bluntly, a slut. She knows she's a slut. She knows that it makes her spoiled goods to any decent man. Nonetheless, for all that, she is a good-hearted person, not a prostitute, not mean, but too often drunk and too often waking up in the bed of a strange man.
That is how the story starts as Gloria wakes up in the bed of Weston Liggett, a married man she met in a New York speakeasy. Weston has abandoned her to go to his family in the country. the night previous he had ripped her dress so he leaves her $60 for the dress, but Glora decides to take the wife's mink coat in compensation. This provides a hook for Weston to look for glorian and, eventually, to realize he is smitten with her. For her part, Gloria understands that Weston is old enough to be her father (he's 40), but she is beginning to think that her life is not going anywhere.
This is a character-driven novel. The characters seem to live their roles in Prohibition-era New York. The glimpse of that New York was endlessly fascinating. Also, interesting, there were pages that seemed to be influenced by John Dos Passos USA Trilogy, with the stream of consciousness approach to setting the background with a barrage of daily news.
Gloria is the main character. We learn about her history of abuse that put her on the road to being a drunken slut. There are other characters, that mostly seem to come in pairs, although the role they play in developing the novel seems superfluous. The story begins with a long section that develops the relationship of writer Jimmy Malloy and his girlfriend Isabel Stannard. This section is so long that a reader might think these were the central characters, although the drop out of the story shortly after Malloy explains that as a “Mick,” he will always be an outsider to genteel society. Malloy does return at the end, but this is a cursory return at best.
Then there is Gloria's best friend, Eddie, who loves Gloria, but does not have sex with her, and Gloria loves Eddie but does not want to reduce Eddie to the relationship of the men she lives with. Eddie learns through the novel that he, in fact, loves his girlfriend, who is nothing like Gloria, but is good wife material, and decides to marry the girlfriend.
Then, there is the Irish-Catholic Farley couple, who get quite a build-up at the beginning, but ultimately are reduced to being stood up after Weston is beat up in a speak-easy.
O'Hara based this story on the notorious story of a flapper found dead in the East River in 1929. The denoument of O'Hara's story is not a neat tying up of Gloria's life. Whether she died in an accident or by her own intent is not spelled out by O'Hara, and, frankly, the end of Gloria's life did not seem foreshadowed by her life. The open-ended nature of the resolution of the story may be unsatisfying for some, but it is thought-provoking.
As a matter of plot and craftsmanship, the story has problems. As I noted, some character development of minor characters could have been left out without harming the story. Character motivation is also problematic. Weston's attraction to Gloria seemed simple lust, despite the authorial pleading that it was something more. Nonetheless, the characters seemed alive and interesting.
For me, the best part of the book was simply that it seemed to be an authentic portrait of the dying Jazz Age. The speak-easies, the Depression, the casual racism, all seemed to be a slice of real life, written close to the time of the novel by someone who was there.
